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That SEO conference in Austin where I lost a $3,000 retainer over one dumb mistake

I was at a local SEO meetup in Austin last spring and a guy I knew from the forums told me he lost a $3,000 monthly retainer because his client found a broken internal link on their homepage. The client saw it as a sign of carelessness and walked away within a week. That hit me hard because I realized I was skipping basic site audits for bigger picture stuff like keywords and backlinks. Now I run a full crawl on every client site before I even start talking strategy, and I check for broken links every single month without fail. Has anyone else lost work over a small technical thing you didn't think mattered?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_mary8d ago

That's the kind of wake-up call that sticks with you forever (the expensive kind, sadly). Broken links feel so minor but they're basically a neon sign saying "we don't check our work.

kim_mason558d ago

and you know what @the_mary, i think the real kicker is that broken links don't even have to exist anymore... there are so many tools that check for them automatically, for free even. so when a site has them, it's not just a "we don't check our work" sign, it's a "we don't care enough to run a simple script" sign. that feels worse to me, somehow. like, you could get that wake-up call for zero dollars but you just... didn't.

finleym374d ago

nah wait @the_mary i gotta push back a little on that. free link checkers exist but they only catch the obvious stuff like 404s. they won't catch a redirect that points to some outdated page that still loads but has wrong info. that kind of thing takes a person actually clicking through and paying attention. so yeah running a script is better than nothing but it doesn't fix everything. still kinda lame when a site has tons of dead links though, i'll give you that. it's like they put in the bare minimum effort and called it a day.